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Tom Hunt is a TEDx Speaker, Dragons’ Den Failure & Internet Entrepreneur.
Before that he studied Chemistry at Imperial College London and followed the herd to a management consulting job in the City Of London.
I got bored, built Virtual Valley (online marketplace connecting online entrepreneurs and Filipino Virtual Assistants) from scratch whilst traveling the world and sold 90% of it.
Meanwhile, I invested the majority of my net worth in Bitcoin and a few other companies.
I believe that entrepreneurship, marketing and decentralisation are becoming increasingly important and therefore write about them here: http://tomhunt.io/blog
City where you’re from: London
Hobbies: Reading, Yoga, Gym
Favorite quote:
“You must become like a child to enter into the gates of heaven” Jesus
Social accounts:
What are you working on? How did you come up with this idea?
Currently between projects after starting and selling Sneez.
We created Sneez to solve our own problem: our VA Manager was spending too much time incentivizing our customers to share content about our male leggings eCom brand. Sneez increases the amount of social shares eCom brands get, and enables them to load the content onto their own stores in a single click.
How is your company different?
At Sneez, we are eCom store owners, building a tool for eCom store owners, we know what it takes to build an eCom brand and therefore know EXACTLY what to build to enable other eCom brands to do this.
What’s your dream with your company?
N/A – we are selling it
How do you creatively advertise?
We tell the story of our eCom brand going from $5k-$100k per month revenue for free on our blog and then retarget people to start a 7 day free trial with the app:
https://www.betabound.com/sneez-io-private-beta/
What do you think is the most important quality to be successful in getting exposure on the internet?
Easily… the ability to elicit emotion.
Memories link to emotions.
If you can make your potential customers FEEL something with your ad or your content, they will remember you and will come back when they need your product/service 😉
What were your biggest failure and biggest success? What did you learn from them?
I tried to launch an information product in the dating niche in 2015, I built a list of just 200 people in 3 months by creating content on a blog, then launched the product and sold just 1.
I realised that to gain people’s trust you need to actually give them what they want in the form of information (or content).
Since then, I developed a new school of thought called Free Traffic Forever, that I outline on my blog here:
http://tomhunt.io/blog/how-to-get-free-traffic
Value-add questions
What should an entrepreneur focus on?
Building a system that delivers a product/service that people actually want.
The more you work on something, the greater likelihood there is that you will delude yourself that you are building something valuable.
The remedy?
Ask people for money as soon as you have something that is sellable.
What are some of the best books you’ve ever read?
- Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
- Millionaire Fastlane – Mj Demarco
- Evolution Of Everything – Matt Ridley
- The Icarus Deception – Seth Godin
Where do you see yourself and your product in a couple years?
Owning and investing in a number of online businesses.
Thanks Tom for sharing your story with us on Future Sharks!
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